10.5 weeks: Continuing progress

On Friday I had my ~4 month checkup at the hospital.  I saw the specialist nurse for about 5 minutes.  She looked in my ears, asked if there were any problems, and gave me a clean bill of health!  I mentioned the issues I'd had a couple of weeks ago, with soreness around the implant area.  But since it has pretty well gone now, she wasn't able to give any insights into their cause other than to speculate that it was either an infection or some kind of mild neuralgia.  Since my pain wasn't intense or shooting, this doesn't seem very likely, but I guess that as long as it's not happening now, it doesn't really matter what it was...

I also had appointments with the audiologist and speech therapist.

The audiologist did the usual tests of each one of the 16 channels, optimising their settings, and giving me a bit more gain in the lower frequencies as we found I was able to tolerate some increase there.  He hopes that this might enable me to hear the lower frequencies a little more clearly, and help with differentiating between male and female voices - something I can't really do at the moment.

He asked which of the two previous programmes I preferred, and I said that I couldn't really tell the difference between them.  So he's given me the one with the slightly higher IDR (Internal Dynamic Range), of 65dB, as the larger range would usually be preferred, unless I don't like/want it.  He did some experimenting with making various vowel and consonant sounds, with his mouth obscured so I couldn't cheat by lipreading (aa, oo, ee, mm, ss, shh), to see if I could correctly identify which sounds he was making.  I had a pretty good success rate, and he was pleased with that.

I now have four programmes set on the CI processor, for use in various different settings.

Audiologist's elegant summary of the programmes

1. Programme 1 is the one I will use in most regular everyday situations.
2. Programme 2 is the UltraZoom programme for use in noisy situations, to help me focus on sounds (usually speech) directly in front of me, and help to reduce background noise.
3. Programme 3 is for listening to music.  I think it has a higher IDR, which gives a bit more gain with quieter sounds as well (very quiet sounds would be unnecessary and irritating to hear normally, but might be useful in listening to music).
4. Programme 4 is for use with a T-loop (induction loop).  I rarely use this, but thought I might as well have it, it might be useful if I'm visiting a church which a T-loop, or I could even try using it at the bank, post office or other shops where they have a loop at the counter.  (I've never bothered with those before, but I might as well try it sometime to see if they are any good!) 

I told the audiologist that I was hearing voices better in noisy situations, finding it a bit easier to pick out voices from the background noise with a CI, compared to hearing aids (this is in the programme 1/normal mode, even before turning on the UltraZoom programme, which helps even more).  He wasn't surprised and said there were two reasons this would be the case.  One is because of the software that Advanced Bionics (the manufacturer of my CI) have, that gives priority to speech over other noises.  The other reason is because I'm hearing more high frequencies now than previously, and speech tends to have more high frequency sounds in it than background noise does.

He also did another hearing test. Results below, along with the previous one, from 26th June (ignore the text saying 'right' at the top of the second image - they are both of the CI in the left ear).  All the points plotted are between 25 and 35dB.  Last time they were between 30 and 45dB.  I'm surprised there's been an improvement since the last time, when the gain has hardly changed.  Is my brain getting better at detecting sounds that previously it might have ignored/not noticed? It will be interesting to see what happens at the next appointment/test, in November...  

19th July 2019

26th June 2019

In my appointment with the Speech Therapist she was pleased to hear that I'm not nearly so tired now.  I'm still a bit more tired than I used to be with hearing aids, but I no longer have the exhaustion of the first 8 weeks after switch on. We chatted about where my focus should be, during my listening practices.  I am going to have to be more intentional about finding time to do these now, as the school holidays have started, and for the next 6 weeks I will no longer have any child free times during the day!  I was telling the boys about the listening the other day, and they were interested to do some with me, and see if they could do it better than me!  So maybe that's the way to go...?!

The SLT encouraged me to keep going with paragraph tracking exercises.  Also to start trying some exercises practicing differentiating between male and female voices, and to do some listening to musical instruments - we spent some time during the session on Friday doing this, and talking about what the different instruments (piano, violin, clarinet, flute, trumpet french horn, etc) sounded like to me.  Some, like the piano, sounded familiar, and nice to listen to.  Others, like the violin and flute, sounded awful to me!  With practice maybe I'll learn to hear the beauty in those sounds too...

We finished up with a comprehension test (listening to the computer speaking short sentences to see how much I could understand without lipreading).  This time I got 30%!  This is compared to 17% on 31st May, 7 weeks ago.  A clear sign of progress being made! Also, this is good compared to doing the same test with hearing aids, when I got 18/19% with one hearing aid at a time, and 28% with both hearing aids in.  One CI is giving me slightly better clarity in hearing than two hearing aids were previously.  And continued progress is expected. How exciting is that?! :)

I now have a long break until my next appointment in November.  At this appointment they will re-fit the hearing aid in my right ear, giving me a return to stereo sound.  It will be interesting to see how that works out - will my brain cope with different types of sounds in each ear, or will I end up feeling unbalanced and disoriented?  It's a long wait to find out.  Meanwhile, the warm weather is here, the boys have finished at school and preschool for the summer (hurrah!), and I don't know how much time or energy I'll have for blogging! Time will tell....